This disclosure relates to a meeting minutes creation system.
There are some conventionally-known technologies that have been used during meetings and gatherings to automatically create meeting materials and meeting minutes.
One of the conventionally-known technologies includes a method for semi-automatically managing meeting materials and making preparations necessary to hold a meeting in a teleconference system in which a plurality of computers are connected via a network, and the content displayed on the display of one of the computers is simultaneously displayed on all the other computers to share the same content. The typical method for semi-automatically managing and preparing meeting materials in a teleconference system includes: a step of storing meeting materials in a meeting server before the teleconference starts, and automatically creating attribute files of the meeting materials, such as the name of the materials and who created them; a step of performing management operations, including deletion and updates, on the meeting materials stored in the meeting server; a step of extracting information about the meeting materials stored in the meeting server from the attribute files and automatically creating a table of meeting contents based on the extracted information; a step of automatically distributing the materials stored in the meeting server and the table of meeting contents to the computer terminals of all the attendees before the teleconference; and a step of converting memos input through keyboards during the meeting into a minutes format to create teleconference minutes to be released publicly after the teleconference.
In addition, conventionally-known teleconference systems allow users to open a shared window on every networked computer to display identical data, and allow the users to exchange meeting data through the shared windows. One of the typical teleconference systems includes: a message generating means that when an input event of text data, image data, or audio data occurs, generates a message packet for data corresponding to every event that occurred, the message packet being assigned with identification information representing which types of text, image, or audio data the occurred event attributes to, and a sequence number representing the order in which the event occurs in the data types; a broadcasting means that broadcasts the message packet generated by the message generating means to all other networked computers; and a means that receives message packets transmitted from the other computers and the message packet transmitted from the computer that generated it using its own message generating means, displays the text data and image data in the order the events have occurred based on the identification information and sequence number contained in the message packet on a shared window, and reproduces the audio data in the order in which the events have occurred. This teleconference system is also characterized by updating input events of different types of data that occurred in a computer, for all the other computers, including the computer where the input event occurred, in real time.
A typical automatic minutes creating apparatus includes an audio input device, an audio-to-text conversion device that successively converts audio data input by the audio input device to text strings, and a file creating device that creates a first file containing a document with the text strings converted by the audio-to-text conversion device arranged in order. If the audio-to-text conversion device provides a plurality of candidate text strings during the conversion of an audio part, the typical automatic minutes creating apparatus creates a second file that contains data about location information of a document part corresponding to the audio part in the first file.